Bodies of all Kansas plane crash victims removed

WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — The bodies of all four victims have been recovered from the rubble of a Wichita flight training facility that was struck by an airplane earlier in the week, according to the city's fire marshal.

Wichita Fire Marshal Brad Crisp said in a news conference Saturday night that crews removed the body of the pilot (http://bit.ly/1uirRxr ) from the roof of the Flight Safety International Learning Center at Wichita Mid-Continent Airport.

The bodies of the other three victims who were inside a flight simulator when the twin-engine plane hit Thursday had been removed Friday.

Crisp said crews had a hard time reaching the pilot's body because the walls and roof of the structure, which caught on fire after the crash, were crumbling.

Wichita fire crews plan to remain at the crash scene through at least Sunday to deal with small flare-ups, Crisp said.

"There are a lot of factors, including aviation fuel that's still in the building, that we have to pay attention to," he said.

Heavy-equipment operators were also on scene, deconstructing parts of the building, the newspaper reported.

Police have confirmed the identity of the pilot as Mark Goldstein, 53, but Crisp declined Saturday to release the other victims' names, saying that the coroner's office was working to identify them and notify their families.

National Transportation Safety Board spokesman Peter Knudson told the newspaper Friday that the cockpit voice recorder had been removed by lowering someone in a harness into the rubble.

"We didn't want to wait until the building was safe to go into," Knudson said. "We wanted to get that information as quickly as possible."

Knudson said the voice recorder would be shipped to Washington, D.C., for analysis.

Knudson said that the NTSB had determined there was also "some sort of data recorder" on board. It was not clear whether that recorder survived because it was not in a crash-hardened black box, though Knudson said officials are hopeful they can secure it.